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Egypt braces for new wave of protests Sunday

By David D. Kirkpatrick New York Times News Service

Posted:
06/29/2013 10:57:34 PM MDT

Updated:
06/29/2013 10:58:41 PM MDT

CAIRO -- Thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, many wearing hard hats and armed with makeshift clubs, are camped near the presidential palace in anticipation of a battle to defend their ally, President Mohammed Morsi. In three days of protests against him around the Nile Delta, gunmen have killed at least five Brotherhood members and set fire to several of its offices.

The use of firearms is becoming more common on all sides. Secular activists who once chanted, "peaceful, peaceful," now joke darkly about the inevitability of violence: "Peaceful is dead."

With a new wave of protests scheduled for today, Egypt's most respected Muslim cleric warned in a statement this weekend of potential "civil war."

A year after Egypt's first credible presidential election, the ballot box has failed to deliver on promises of unquestioned legitimacy or the nonviolent resolution of political disputes. In more than two years of post-revolutionary chaos and crises, the streets have never felt so tense.

"It is gone -- that unity is gone completely," said Islam Lotfy, a former youth leader of the Brotherhood who helped lead the revolt against Mubarak. He no longer knows what side to stand on in the protests today, he said, because as a governing party the Brotherhood has turned out to be "a bunch of losers" while the opposition in the streets now includes too many elements of the former autocracy, "the people who killed my friends and who tried to kill me."

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